Manufacturers produce products for sale to customers. In the sales process, customers place demands on manufacturers. A customer demand may consist of a request-for a particular quantity of a product by a specific date. This date and quantity information may be collectively referred to as the "customer request" or "request information".
Manufacturing and distribution facilities have limited resources (capacity) and limited inventories (materials). Therefore, every customer request may not be satisfiable in that some may receive no promise, others may receive an inadequate one. Planning and managing which customer requests to promise and fulfill, termed "demand management", is a fundamental and critical activity of most manufacturing and distribution organizations.
Due to material, capacity and other limitations, a manufacturer may not be able to meet a particular customer request. In this situation, the manufacturer typically negotiates with the customer to deliver a quantity of product by one or more dates agreeable to the customer. This date and quantity information may be referred to as the "manufacturer promise" or "promise information". Based on the manufacturer promise, the manufacturer creates operational plans to implement the promise information. Manufacturers may use a combination of diverse software tools in the negotiating and planning processes.
Traditional methods for demand management have several problems. First, such methods and systems are not integrated. Several different tools may be required to implement the entire demand management strategy. Second, such traditional systems and methods are not dynamic. Once a plan is in place, it is difficult for the manufacturer to react to changing circumstances and update the plan. Third, order promising to customers is often done based upon an infeasible plan. Later attempts to find a feasible plan that will satisfy the promises are often futile.
The environment today requires more and more responsiveness. Customers require significant product diversity and want promises to be made to their requests immediately, while on the phone. The traditional way of promising in configure-to-order or make-to-order environments involves submitting the request to the planners and then, a few days or weeks later, after the planners have gone through a planning cycle, receiving a promise or rejection.
Many manufacturing and distribution organizations have several sales offices associated with each manufacturing factory. Each sales office independently promises to supply products from the factory to customers. This is referred to as a "distributed organization". Each sales person in each of the sales organizations needs to be able to make instantaneous promises, simultaneously with other sales people doing the same. In addition, each of those promises need to be fulfillable by a feasible plan.
To better meet customer demand, the manufacturer must build product and/or intermediate items before receiving customer orders. This production is based on projections called "forecast orders". A product produced based on these forecast orders is referred to as "available to promise" or "ATP". ATP consists of quantities of products with associated dates that the products are scheduled to be available for delivery to the customer.
In distributed organizations a sales office may need approval from the factory before ATP may be promised to meet a customer request. This approval process may take up to a week under current practices. This delay is unacceptable in today's business environment.